With release of WordPress 5.0 and infamous Gutenberg editor and of course after years of neglect, I thought of giving my website a makeover. And for some reason, it just felt right to give the new editor a try with the default WordPress Twenty Nineteen theme.

So far I’m happy with what I have, although I’m trying to work on the underlying infrastructure to ensure that the website loads at the speed of light. More on that soon..

Here are 5 WordPress communities that are worth your time! Well, other than WordPress forums itself.

1. WP Tavern

The guy behind this community (It started as a forum first) is Jeffr0. Do I need to say more? If still you aren’t satisfied, here are some of the reasons why you should be active in this community – go ahead and comment on those posts.

It’s part of the list of websites in “Other WordPress News” widget that you see in the dashboard.

It’s been there for 5 years.

Again, Jeffr0 is the guy behind it! If you don’t know about him and you’re part of WordPress community. My question to you – living under the rocks?

Matt Mullenweg is the owner of the site. Jeff sold it to him in 2011. You get all the news you want around WordPress universe! (BuddyPress, bbPress etc.)

2. WordPress Stackexchange

If you are a WordPress developer or want to become one then this is the place where you should be active the most! Just go out and answer as much as you can. Build solutions, give to the community, don’t expect anything in return – you’d only increase your knowledge while doing so, your profile/personal brand and it will all come back to you one day! It’s a community specifically that would teach you the right WordPress development and what it takes to ask the right questions and how to give right answers.

3. WPMU Dev Forum

Agreed this community is more dedicated towards (has more users of WPMU Dev), however no one can take away the fact that team at incsub is doing great by providing amazing premium plugins and this free community. Anyone can join, can ask questions and get answers to their issues. The community is helpful and pretty active.

4. AdvancedWP.org

It’s an aggregator of a Facebook group with about 1800+ members. Focused towards technical side of WordPress and even a place to find and connect with other developers around the world. They’ve got pretty simple rules to follow to ensure that it doesn’t suffer from stupid marketing tricks by spammers as seen on almost every facebook group. Even though, its a Facebook Group – I like the fact that they’ve setup a website that also shows the activity going on in the Facebook group.

5. ManageWP.org

ManageWP.org, A reddit style community that lets you vote up the best of the content. However, focused towards WordPress community. The community was launched by the team behind ManageWP.com service [It’s like what torquemag is for WPEngine], I loved the community from the start however, came across certain issues too – Here’s my little feedback:

Different profiles through Facebook & Twitter – Fantastic point, however it creates two different profiles with in ManageWP.org. It should by default detect through email that an account exists and these profiles should be merged/linked.

No comments on submitted links: One thing that I loved about ManageWP.org is that it doesn’t have its own comments for each submitted link. This makes the user to go to the article and share their comments directly on the post – rather on the submitted story link in ManageWP. Pretty healthy for bloggers. Like, one of my submitted link – got about 11 comments from various users that were referred by ManageWP, had they come from Reddit – the comment would have been made on Reddit’s story rather than the actual blog post.

Points system – Fantastic feature. Makes the user stick – ego boosts! I’m on 10th Rank as a member with 217 points. Not bad, huh? It’s a new community!

Simple & Intuitive UI – I just love the simplicity of the community. It really easy to use and understand the whole website. It’d be good to have a reminder for new profiles to fill all their details, because personal profile pages, don’t look good until all the fields are filled.

Content – The biggest and the best factor. Members of the community are putting up interesting stuff around WordPress that is almost everything that WordPress community worries about. And there is something for everyone – for developers, for business guys, for marketers – if you are related to WordPress eco-system – you’d certainly want to be part of this community.

Disclaimer: This post is dedicated to ManageWP.org. Why? Because I want the t-shirt they’ve promised to deliver on my doorstep for a review ? Well, in all honesty – I would also mention that my views are unbiased and the reason I didn’t make it an out and out review of ManageWP was to ensure that I add some value in this post.

7 Years in WordPress development teaches you a lot of things about WP & its working. However, what’s the way to prove it that one know more than every other random person out there, who claims to know WordPress & titles themselves as Expert or Guru? The sad part is none.

When almost every other organization like Adobe, Microsoft, Cisco, RedHat, SalesForce, Apple etc. offers a certification or an official course, I see Automattic or WordPress foundation are not taking any step towards the same, when it comes to certifying developers as WordPress certified developers. Coming to web platforms, Magento has it’s own certification program however similar to WordPress, Drupal doesn’t, for which Dries (Founder of Acquia & Project lead of Drupal) has given some reasons as to why he wouldn’t want Acquia to come up with its own Drupal’s certification either. Probably, Matt also shares similar thoughts or has his own views towards this subject.

At 10th anniversary of WordPress, Automattic & WordPress foundation happily announced that the WordPress is currently powering close to 18.9% of the web. This number proves that there is a huge economy in WordPress community and more jobs are opening up for WordPress developers. Unfortunately, there is no way to confirm if the “so called WordPress expert” is a real expert or someone who has just played around with WordPress for a month, installed it locally about 10 times or someone who truly makes a living out of it & doing every bit to enhance their skills as a WordPress Developer.

In my experience, I’ve worked with companies directly who need some WordPress solution, digital agencies who have outsourced work to me, developers who are stuck with something, freelancers who are suffering because they bought a theme from ThemeForest. Majority of them are suffering because of poor or lack of “WordPress coding standards“. I see “expert” theme companies making blunders while developing themes in which they happily include different versions of jQuery more than twice in front-end.

For these reasons, I see companies spending more money on support rather than the development of the whole solution. Isn’t that a reason enough to come up with a certification to help differentiate the good developers with the bad ones? Isn’t there a need to give organizations a chance to breathe easy when it comes to hiring WordPress developers? Hopefully, we’ll have some sort of certification in near future, till then I wish companies good luck in finding great talent out of the plethora of “WordPress Experts“!